Final Year of INSIGHT Study Focuses on Data Analysis

The INSIGHT (“An integrative system for enhancing fluid intelligence (Gf) through human cognitive activity, fitness, high-definition transcranial direct-current brain stimulation, and nutritional intervention”) project, led by Aron Barbey, associate professor of psychology and full-time faculty member in the Intelligence, Learning, and Plasticity Group at the Beckman Institute, will receive nearly a million dollars in funding as part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) SHARP program.

By Ryan Rodgers. Published on October 25, 2016

This is the third and final year of the INSIGHT project, which aims to develop evidence-based tools and methods that can improve the quality of human judgment and reasoning in complex, real-world environments.

“We are pleased to contribute to the IARPA SHARP Program for another year,” said Barbey. “We will direct our efforts toward analyzing and publishing data from the INSIGHT project, which now represents the largest and most comprehensive study investigating the combined beneficial effects of cognitive training, physical fitness training, and mindfulness meditation on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of human intelligence.”

In the first year, INSIGHT focused on how fitness, cognitive training, and non-invasive neural stimulation-based interventions affected cognitive function.

In the second year, INSIGHT researchers continued to examine fitness and cognitive training, but substituted mindfulness meditation for neural stimulation in the intervention protocol.

For this third and final year of INSIGHT, Barbey’s team will focus on analyzing the data gathered from the previous years and integrate that with data gathered by the other IARPA SHARP team, which consists of collaborators at other industry and academic organizations.